Lady Merton, Colonist Part 30

And he began to describe a new matter in which he had been lately engaged--a large development scheme applying to some of the great Peace River region north of Edmonton. And as he told her of his August journey through this n.o.ble country, with its superb rivers, its s.h.i.+ning lakes and forests, and its scattered settlers, waiting for a Government which was their servant and not their tyrant, to come and help their first steps in ordered civilisation; to bring steamers to their waters, railways to link their settlements, and fresh settlers to let loose the fertile forces of their earth--she suddenly saw in him his old self--the Anderson who had sat beside her in the crossing of the prairies, who had looked into her eyes the day of Roger's Pa.s.s. He had grown older and thinner; his hair was even lightly touched with grey. But the traces in him of endurance and of pain were like the weathering of a fine building; mellowing had come, and strength had not been lost.

Yet still no word of feeling, of intimacy even. Her soul cried out within her, but there was no answer. Then, when it was time to dress, and she led him through the hall, to the inlaid staircase with its famous bal.u.s.trading--early English ironwork of extraordinary delicacy--and through the endless corridors upstairs, old and dim, but crowded with portraits and fine furniture, Anderson looked round him in amazement.

"What a wonderful place!"

"It is too old!" cried Elizabeth, petulantly; then with a touch of repentance--"Yet of course we love it. We are not so stifled here as you would be."

He smiled and did not reply.

"Confess you have been stifled--ever since you came to England."

He drew a long breath, throwing back his head with a gesture which made Elizabeth smile. He smiled in return.

"It was you who warned me how small it would all seem. Such little fields--such little rivers--such tiny journeys! And these immense towns treading on each other's heels. Don't you feel crowded up?"

"You are home-sick already?"

He laughed--"No, no!" But the gleam in his eyes admitted it. And Elizabeth's heart sank--down and down.

A few more guests arrived for Sunday--a couple of politicians, a journalist, a poet, one or two agreeable women, a young Lord S., who had just succeeded to one of the oldest of English marquisates, and so on.

Elizabeth had chosen the party to give Anderson pleasure, and as a guest he did not disappoint her pride in him. He talked well and modestly, and the feeling towards Canada and the Canadians in English society had been of late years so friendly that although there was often colossal ignorance, there was no coolness in the atmosphere about him. Lord S.

confused Lake Superior with Lake Ontario, and was of opinion that the Mackenzie River flowed into the Ottawa. But he was kind enough to say that he would far sooner go to Canada than any of "those beastly places abroad"--and as he was just a simple handsome youth, Anderson took to him, as he had taken to Philip at Lake Louise, and by the afternoon of Sunday was talking sport and big game in a manner to hold the smoking-room enthralled.

Only unfortunately Philip was not there to hear. He had been over-tired by the shoot, and had caught a chill beside. The doctor was in the house, and Mrs. Gaddesden had very little mind to give to her Sunday party. Elizabeth felt a thrill of something like comfort as she noticed how in the course of the day Anderson unconsciously slipped back into the old Canadian position; sitting with Philip, amusing him and "chaffing" him; inducing him to obey his doctor; cheering his mother, and in general producing in Martindale itself the same impression of masculine help and support which he had produced on Elizabeth, five months before, in a Canadian hotel.

By Sunday evening Mrs. Gaddesden, instead of a watchful enemy, had become his firm friend; and in her timid, confused way she asked him to come for a walk with her in the November dusk. Then, to his astonishment, she poured out her heart to him about her son, whose health, together with his recklessness, his determination to live like other and sound men, was making the two women who loved him more and more anxious. Anderson was very sorry for the little lady, and genuinely alarmed himself with regard to Philip, whose physical condition seemed to him to have changed considerably for the worse since the Canadian journey. His kindness, his real concern, melted Mrs. Gaddesden's heart.

"I hope we shall find you in town when we come up!" she said, eagerly, as they turned back to the house, forgetting, in her maternal egotism, everything but her boy. "Our man here wants a consultation. We shall go up next week for a short time before Christmas."

Anderson hesitated a moment.

"Yes," he said, slowly, but in a changed voice, "Yes, I shall still be there."

Whereupon, with perturbation, Mrs. Gaddesden at last remembered there were other lions in the path. They had not said a single word--however conventional--of Elizabeth. But she quickly consoled herself by the reflection that he must have seen by now, poor fellow, how hopeless it was; and that being so, what was there to be said against admitting him to their circle, as a real friend of all the family--Philip's friend, Elizabeth's, and her own?

That night Mrs. Gaddesden was awakened by her maid between twelve and one. Mr. Gaddesden wanted a certain medicine that he thought was in his mother's room. Mrs. Gaddesden threw on her dressing-gown and looked for it anxiously in vain. Perhaps Elizabeth might remember where it was last seen. She hurried to her. Elizabeth had a sitting-room and bedroom at the end of the corridor, and Mrs. Gaddesden went into the sitting-room first, as quietly as possible, so as not to startle her daughter.

She had hardly entered and closed the door behind her, guided by the light of a still flickering fire, when a sound from the inner room arrested her.

Elizabeth--Elizabeth in distress?

The mother stood rooted to the spot, in a sudden anguish.

Elizabeth--sobbing? Only once in her life had Mrs. Gaddesden heard that sound before--the night that the news of Francis Merton's death reached Martindale, and Elizabeth had wept, as her mother believed, more for what her young husband might have been to her, than for what he had been. Elizabeth's eyes filled readily with tears answering to pity or high feeling; but this fierce stifled emotion--this abandonment of pain!

Mrs. Gaddesden stood trembling and motionless, the tears on her own cheeks. Conjecture hurried through her mind. She seemed to be learning her daughter, her gay and tender Elizabeth, afresh. At last she turned and crept out of the room, noiselessly shutting the door. After lingering a while in the pa.s.sage, she knocked, with an uncertain hand, and waited till Elizabeth came--Elizabeth, hardly visible in the firelight, her brown hair falling like a veil round her face.

CHAPTER XIV

A few days later the Gaddesdens were in town, settled in a house in Portman Square. Philip was increasingly ill, and moreover shrouded in a bitterness of spirit which wrung his mother's heart. She suspected a new cause for it in the fancy that he had lately taken for Alice Lucas, the girl in the white chiffon, who had piped to Mariette in vain. Not that he ever now wanted to see her. He had pa.s.sed into a phase indeed of refusing all society--except that of George Anderson. A floor of the Portman Square house was given up to him. Various treatments were being tried, and as soon as he was strong enough his mother was to take him to the South. Meanwhile his only pleasure seemed to lie in Anderson's visits, which however could not be frequent, for the business of the Conference was heavy, and after the daily sittings were over, the interviews and correspondence connected with them took much time.

On these occasions, whether early in the morning before the business of the day began, or in the hour before dinner--sometimes even late at night--Anderson after his chat with the invalid would descend from Philip's room to the drawing-room below, only allowing himself a few minutes, and glancing always with a quickening of the pulse through the shadows of the large room, to see whether it held two persons or one.

Mrs. Gaddesden was invariably there; a small, faded woman in trailing lace dresses, who would sit waiting for him, her embroidery on her knee, and when he appeared would hurry across the floor to meet him, dropping silks, scissors, handkerchief on the way. This dropping of all her incidental possessions--a performance repeated night after night, and followed always by her soft fluttering apologies--soon came to be symbolic, in Anderson's eyes. She moved on the impulse of the moment, without thinking what she might scatter by the way. Yet the impulse was always a loving impulse--and the regrets were sincere.

As to the relation to Anderson, Philip was here the pivot of the situation exactly as he had been in Canada. Just as his physical weakness, and the demands he founded upon it had bound the Canadian to their chariot wheels in the Rockies, so now--_mutatis mutandis_--in London. Mrs. Gaddesden before a week was over had become pitifully dependent upon him, simply because Philip was pleased to desire his society, and showed a flicker of cheerfulness whenever he appeared. She was torn indeed between her memory of Elizabeth's sobbing, and her hunger to give Philip the moon out of the sky, should he happen to want it. Sons must come first, daughters second; such has been the philosophy of mothers from the beginning. She feared--desperately feared--that Elizabeth had given her heart away. And as she agreed with Philip that it would not be a seemly or tolerable marriage for Elizabeth, she would, in the natural course of things, both for Elizabeth's sake and the family's, have tried to keep the unseemly suitor at a distance. But here he was, planted somehow in the very midst of their life, and she, making feeble efforts day after day to induce him to root himself there still more firmly. Sometimes indeed she would try to press alternatives on Philip. But Philip would not have them. What with the physical and moral force that seemed to radiate from Anderson, and bring stimulus with them to the weaker life--and what with the lad's sick alienation for the moment from his ordinary friends and occupations, Anderson reigned supreme, often clearly to his own trouble and embarra.s.sment. Had it not been for Philip, Portman Square would have seen him but seldom. That Elizabeth knew with a sharp certainty, dim though it might be to her mother. But as it was, the boy's tragic clinging to his new friend governed all else, simply because at the bottom of each heart, unrecognised and unexpressed, lurked the same foreboding, the same fear of fears.

The tragic clinging was also, alack, a tragic selfishness. Philip had a substantial share of that quick perception which in Elizabeth became something exquisite and impersonal, the source of all high emotions.

When Delaine had first suggested to him "an attachment" between Anderson and his sister, a hundred impressions of his own had emerged to verify the statement and aggravate his wrath; and when Anderson had said "a man of my history is not going to ask your sister to marry him," Philip perfectly understood that but for the history the attempt would have been made. Anderson was therefore--most unreasonably and presumptuously--in love with Elizabeth; and as to Elizabeth, the indications here also were not lost upon Philip. It was all very amazing, and he wished, to use his phrase to his mother, that it would "work off." But whether or no, he could not do without Anderson--if Anderson was to be had. He threw him and Elizabeth together, recklessly; trusting to Anderson's word, and unable to resist his own craving for comfort and distraction.

The days pa.s.sed on, days so charged with feeling for Elizabeth that they could only be met at all by a kind of resolute stillness and self-control. Philip was very dependent on the gossip his mother and sister brought him from the world outside. Elizabeth therefore, to please him, went into society as usual, and forgot her heartaches, for her brother and for herself, as best she could. Outwardly she was much occupied in doing all that could be done--socially and even politically--for Anderson and Mariette. She had power and she used it.

The two friends found themselves the object of one of those sudden cordialities that open all doors, even the most difficult, and run like a warm wave through London society. Mariette remained throughout the ironic spectator--friendly on his own terms, but entirely rejecting, often, the terms offered him tacitly or openly, by his English acquaintance.

"Your ways are not mine--your ideals are not mine, G.o.d forbid they should be!"--he seemed to be constantly saying. "But we happen to be oxen bound under the same yoke, and dragging the same plough. No gush, please--but at the same time no ill-will! Loyal?--to your loyalties? Oh yes--quite sufficiently--so long as you don't ask us to let it interfere with our loyalty to our own! Don't be such fools as to expect us to take much interest in your Imperial orgies. But we're all right! Only let us alone--we're all right!"

Such seemed to be the voice of this queer, kindly, satiric personality.

London generally falls into the arms of those who flout her; and Mariette, with his militant Catholicism, and his contempt for our governing ideals, became the fas.h.i.+on. As for Anderson, the contact with English Ministers and men of affairs had but carried on the generous process of development that Nature had designed for a strong man.

Whereas in Mariette the vigorous, self-confident English world--based on the Protestant idea--produced a bitter and profound irritation, Anderson seemed to find in that world something ripening and favouring that brought out all the powers--the intellectual powers at least--of his nature. He did his work admirably; left the impression of a "coming man"

on a great many leading persons interested in the relations between England and Canada; and when as often happened Elizabeth and he found themselves at the same dinner-table, she would watch the changes in him that a larger experience was bringing about, with a heart half proud, half miserable. As for his story, which was very commonly known, in general society, it only added to his attractions. Mothers who were under no anxieties lest he might want to marry their daughters, murmured the facts of his unlucky _provenance_ to each other, and then the more eagerly asked him to dinner.

Meanwhile, for Elizabeth life was one long debate, which left her often at night exhausted and spiritless. The shock of their first meeting at Martindale, when all her pent-up yearning and vague expectation had been met and crushed by the silent force of the man's unaltered will, had pa.s.sed away. She understood him better. The woman who is beloved penetrates to the fact through all the disguises that a lover may attempt. Elizabeth knew well that Anderson had tones and expressions for her that no other woman could win from him; and looking back to their conversation at the Glacier House, she realised, night after night, in the silence of wakeful hours, the fulness of his confession, together with the strength of his recoil from any pretension to marry her.

Yes, he loved her, and his mere anxiety--now, and as things stood--to avoid any extension or even repet.i.tion of their short-lived intimacy, only betrayed the fact the more eloquently. Moreover, he had reason, good reason, to think, as she often pa.s.sionately reminded herself, that he had touched her heart, and that had the course been clear, he might have won her.

But--the course was not clear. From many signs, she understood how deeply the humiliation of the scene at Sicamous had entered into a proud man's blood. Others might forget; he remembered. Moreover, that sense of responsibility--partial responsibility at least--for his father's guilt and degradation, of which he had spoken to her at Glacier, had, she perceived, gone deep with him. It had strengthened a stern and melancholy view of life, inclining him to turn away from personal joy, to an exclusive concern with public duties and responsibilities.

And this whole temper had no doubt been increased by his perception of the Gaddesdens' place in English society. He dared not--he would not--ask a woman so reared in the best that England had to give, now that he understood what that best might be, to renounce it all in favour of what he had to offer. He realised that there was a generous weakness in her own heart on which he might have played. But he would not play; his fixed intention was to disappear as soon as possible from her life; and it was his honest hope that she would marry in her own world and forget him. In fact he was the prey of a kind of moral terror that here also, as in the case of his father, he might make some ghastly mistake, pursuing his own will under the guise of love, as he had once pursued it under the guise of retribution--to Elizabeth's hurt and his own remorse.

All this Elizabeth understood, more or less plainly. Then came the question--granted the situation, how was she to deal with it? Just as he surmised that he could win her if he would, she too believed that were she merely to set herself to prove her own love and evoke his, she could probably break down his resistance. A woman knows her own power.

Feverishly, Elizabeth was sometimes on the point of putting it out, of so provoking and appealing to the pa.s.sion she divined, as to bring him, whether he would or no, to her feet.

But she hesitated. She too felt the responsibility of his life, as of hers. Could she really do this thing--not only begin it, but carry it through without repentance, and without recoil?

She made herself look steadily at this English spectacle with its luxurious complexity, its concentration within a small s.p.a.ce of all the delicacies of sense and soul, its command of a rich European tradition, in which art and literature are living streams springing from fathomless depths of life. Could she, whose every fibre responded so perfectly to the stimulus of this environment, who up till now--but for moments of revolt--had been so happy and at ease in it, could she wrench herself from it--put it behind her--and adapt herself to quite another, without, so to speak, losing herself, and half her value, whatever that might be, as a human being?

As we know, she had already asked herself the question in some fas.h.i.+on, under the shadow of the Rockies. But to handle it in London was a more pressing and poignant affair. It was partly the characteristic question of the modern woman, jealous, as women have never been before in the world's history, on behalf of her own individuality. But Elizabeth put it still more in the interests of her pure and pa.s.sionate feeling for Anderson. He must not--he should not--run any risks in loving her!

On a certain night early in December, Elizabeth had been dining at one of the great houses of London. Anderson too had been there. The dinner party, held in a famous room panelled with full-length Vandycks, had been of the kind that only London can show; since only in England is society at once h.o.m.ogeneous enough and open enough to provide it. In this house, also, the best traditions of an older regime still prevailed, and its gatherings recalled--not without some conscious effort on the part of the hostess--the days of Holland House, and Lady Palmerston. To its smaller dinner parties, which were the object of so many social ambitions, n.o.body was admitted who could not bring a personal contribution. Dukes had no more claim than other people, but as most of the twenty-eight were blood-relations of the house, and some Dukes are agreeable, they took their turn. Cabinet Ministers, Viceroys, Amba.s.sadors, mingled with the men of letters and affairs. There was indeed a certain old-fas.h.i.+oned measure in it all. To be merely notorious--even though you were amusing--was not pa.s.sport enough. The hostess--a beautiful tall woman, with the brow of a child, a quick intellect, and an amazing experience of life--created round her an atmosphere that was really the expression of her own personality; fastidious, and yet eager; cold, and yet steeped in intellectual curiosities and pa.s.sions. Under the mingled stimulus and restraint of it, men and women brought out the best that was in them. The talk was good, and nothing--neither the last violinist, nor the latest _danseuse_--was allowed to interfere with it. And while the dress and jewels of the women were generally what a luxurious capital expects and provides, you might often find some little girl in a dyed frock--with courage, charm and breeding--the centre of the scene.

Elizabeth in white, and wearing some fine jewels which had been her mother's, had found herself placed on the left of her host, with an ex-Viceroy of India on her other hand. Anderson, who was on the opposite side of the table, watched her animation, and the homage that was eagerly paid her by the men around her. Those indeed who had known her of old were of opinion that whereas she had always been an agreeable companion, Lady Merton had now for some mysterious reason blossomed into a beauty. Some kindling change had pa.s.sed over the small features.

Delicacy and reserve were still there, but interfused now with a s.h.i.+mmering and transforming brightness, as though some flame within leapt intermittently to sight.

Elizabeth more than held her own with the ex-Viceroy, who was a person of brilliant parts, accustomed to be flattered by women. She did not flatter him, and he was reduced in the end to making those efforts for himself, which he generally expected other people to make for him.

Elizabeth's success with him drew the attention of several other persons at the table besides Anderson. The ex-Viceroy was a bachelor, and one of the great _partis_ of the day. What could be more fitting than that Elizabeth Merton should carry him off, to the discomfiture of innumerable intriguers?

After dinner, Elizabeth waited for Anderson in the magnificent gallery upstairs where the guests of the evening party were beginning to gather, and the musicians were arriving. When he came she played her usual fairy G.o.dmother's part; introducing him to this person and that, creating an interest in him and in his work, wherever it might be useful to him. It was understood that she had met him in Canada, and that he had been useful to the poor delicate brother. No other idea entered in. That she could have any interest in him for herself would have seemed incredible to this world looking on.